


(Dis)orientation

by quiet__tiger



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Contemplative, Drama, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 06:12:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10713834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiet__tiger/pseuds/quiet__tiger
Summary: Tim's life has always been strange, but now it's even more evident.





	(Dis)orientation

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "Fish Out of Water."
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal 18th-Jun-2009.

It took a lot for Tim Drake to feel truly uncomfortable. He’d worked undercover. He’d worked undercover as a _girl_. He’d been beaten and threatened and kidnapped and held hostage.

But Tim had never been to a frat party.

However, here he was in this clean but still dingy fraternity house, watching other freshmen talk themselves up to seniors who looked down their noses at them. There was so much bullshit going on, mixed in with genuine care and curiosity and history as freshmen showed interest in eventually being recruited. It was interesting in an ethnographic kind of way, but also a bit of a waste of time.

It seemed exhausting to Tim. So many things and people to watch, but he didn’t actually have anyone to talk to, and he was a little perturbed by the large paddles displayed above the mantel.

It was just one more night in a week filled with drunken college students destroying their circadian rhythms and getting a jump on their freshman fifteen. The current party seemed to be a good way to get to know his fellow classmates, all the new people and players in his life.

He just hadn’t expected to feel so… Well. So different.

These people his age didn’t train obsessively. They didn’t study obsessively. They were shallow and crass. They didn’t fight crime and fly at night and hang out with aliens on the weekends. His high school peers hadn’t either, but this was different somehow. In high school, Tim Drake had a secret. In college, Tim Drake was truly different. He hadn’t expected to be a typical college student, but this was all beyond even his preparation.

They didn’t train or study, but the other students did drink and party and screw obsessively, three things Tim couldn’t do without destroying his training or exposing his identity. Watching basic instincts take over rational thought to such an extreme was like immersing himself in another species.

One that vomited in the bushes and urinated on the wall.

This idea of the different species ( _Responsiblius timius_ and _Studious drunkus_ ) was only brought into further focus by the serpentine eyes of the senior now shaking his hand. Not all fraternity brothers were evil, Tim had met normal ones, but this one… He returned the guy’s gaze with a steady stare, and the guy backed off.

Hopefully this didn’t blow his cover. Sure, this was actually the college orientation of Tim Drake, but it wasn’t as if Batman would allow him to take a break from his work as Robin, and Tim wouldn’t either. Just his luck there was a nest of mystic reptiles infiltrating one of the campus’s fraternities and killing its brothers and taking their bodies.

Student by day, crime fighter by night. Maybe college wouldn’t be so different from his regular multitasking life after all.

But maybe once classes started, he could get some rest.


End file.
